They create a medium the advertisers want to advertise into.
They "own the eyeballs," as it were. They create the newspaper that people read.
Google does not own the eyeballs, they are an aggregator but they loudly point out that users could switch. Let's acknowledge that users are not likely to switch away from Google websites, Android, etc. but it's as if Google snatched the newspaper and stuck advertising stickers all over it just before you read it in the morning.
Google owns the eyeballs on the places of the internet that have sold that space to google.
If I have a website and want to monetize it with ads, I'm giving that section of my page to Google. Who now rents the "tower" in my sidebar, and owns the eyeballs of my visitors. The advertisers don't get to own my data. I'm just exposing my audience to their products. If my audience decides that they want the advertised widget, they are then willingly giving their data to the advertiser when they purchase/sign up/whatever.
The only point I agree with you on (if this is what you meant) is how Google ranks search results based on the speed of the content, and who's content loads fastest for Google? AMP... owned by Google.
I think the browser is the equivalent of a newspaper.
It's just you can "open your newspaper" to pages defined by someone on the internet, as opposed to only getting the 30-to-50 pages put out by the newspaper company.
I think the pages within it can be Google, but there's a browser in between. If you use Chrome, then Google totally owns your eyeballs (according to my viewpoint).
But you are spot on with publishers opening up a "tower" on their page, and Google moving in and paying rent. And from that point on, Google is watching you.
Maybe the ISP owns the eyeballs? ISPs are often characterized as either a "content network" (such as Netflix) or an "eyeball network" (such as Comcast). And the networks sometimes fight because Comcast thinks they're the big, bad eyeball network. Netflix, of course, thinks they're the big, bad content network.
Google gives free reading glasses that allows you to read the newspaper. The problem is that they only work for the newspapers they like and the newspapers they like happen to have advertising stickers all over it.
Purportedly unrelated to that they have also told all the newspaper sellers to take a note of when and where you buy your newspaper, but they assure you that is completely unrelated to the advertising side of things.
That sounds like what TV, radio and newspaper ad space sells.
Google on the other hand is selling the data attached to those eye balls. You want Male eye balls, between the age of 18-35? You want eye balls from a certain state? city? county? How about college educated eye balls?
Knowing everything about your eye balls and monetizing that information is Google's real racket...that and fraudulent clicks (that is Google often sells fake eye balls).
If I pay you $5 to show an ad in front of a certain type of person and you come back and tell me that you did it I haven't really learned anything about that person. It seems hard to say that that is the same as selling people's data.
Because sure, Google knows a lot of people and they have a lot of ad space to fill which means they have a good chance at finding and reaching the demographics I asked for but I don’t get any of that information as part of my transaction with them.
If adtech wants to serve us "relevant" ads, that's fine but the intrusive spying has to stop. Plain old contextual ads should be more than enough for that purpose.
With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like. Are the people watching daytime soaps can be 18 or 80, it’s vague topic and time of day based filtering.
Google's guessing of your demographics is amusingly wrong sometimes (you can see the categories it puts you in).
> With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like
People with HBO have disposable incomes. People watching Nick or Disney channel are or have children, whose ages and genders can be further refined based on the shows in question. "You have a 8-11 year old daughter" is absolutely trivial to accurately glean from television, and is basically the single most valuable advertising demographic.
As to Disney watchers, my male collage roommate used to love those shows. At the extreme end MLP friendship is magic has a vastly wider following than the original target demographic.
They both correlate with demographic data, TV is swimply wildly inaccurate and not tied to a specific individual.
On TV, you can target so many demographics indirectly by buying ads on shows they like. Companies like Nielson have been reporting on the demographics watching shows for decades. You can also target geographically at least down to the county-ish level.
TV stations and Google both know who is watching what and selling access to their customers to advertisers. Google might be a bit more sophisticated than TV, but besides "retargeting" (following you around different sites) they use the same basic techniques and offer the same things to Advertisers
If I ran a newsletter, "selling data" would be me giving a 3rd party my mailing list. Profiting from the data would be me "selling eyeballs" from my list.
That is effectively what Google and Facebook do. They are in the eyeball selling industry, not email selling.